Did LinkedIn just become BranchOut? The endorsement story

I got the title for this post from a conversation I had earlier this week in relation to the much talked about endorsements feature on LinkedIn. Just in case you have been offline for the last three months, the way the feature works is that users add up to 50 skills to their profile. LinkedIn offer suggestions and alternatives to add. When you get an endorsement you get asked if you want to endorse back, then if you do you get offered 4 more profiles with skills to endorse. You can endorse these individually or with one click, or you can choose to close the window. Each time you endorse a skill another one pops up. If you close off one of the windows by clicking on the cross, then another one pops up. It is quick and easy to endorse. Personally, I never endorse all 4 at once, but I endorse those profiles that I think are deserving. Some of the people deserve endorsing, so I endorse them, whilst others just make me laugh. I’ve been asked if the likes of Glen Cathey know about sourcing (hell yes), and then I’ve been asked if others (who I won’t mention), know about social media which has just made me laugh.

LinkedIn seem to be experimenting about when they ask you to endorse. I’ve seen it when I log in, when I look at another users profile, or when I receive an endorsement. They will figure out the best place for this interaction, I’m sure. The reference to BranchOut in the title refers to the Facebook application who grew to 25 million users really quickly when they introduced a mobile app, that automatically enabled you to invite 50 friends with one click (and set up profiles for them to claim). I documented their growth in users HERE. The decline in users was almost as rapid as the rise, and the constant spamming of invites proved universally unpopular. Having alienated many Facebook users, the business is now building a network off Facebook, in theory to rival LinkedIn. Because of the way that the endorsements are easy and take no effort to complete the comparison with BranchOut, and the question over the value of the endorsements are inevitable. The interesting thing about the “BranchOut” method of growth was that Glassdoor adopted the same method when they launched their Facebook app, with one click invites to 50 friends at a time. This has been so successful for Glassdoor that they have been able to grow user numbers quickly by over 9 million, and significantly grow the number of reviews on the site to make them genuinely global and valuable, hence the recent huge investment. The difference here is that people saw Glassdoor as valuable when they got there, not a feeling they shared about BranchOut. These two examples show that when you ask users to do something when they log in, and make it as simple as one click, they usually comply. That is the BranchOut legacy, and is a method LinkedIn have followed to spread the endorsement of skills quickly.

To understand the reasoning behind this we need to look at why populating the skills profiles is so important to LinkedIn. It has been possible to add skills to profiles for about 18 months now, but because a profile showed 100% complete without it, very few people actually added skills to their profile. This was a bit of a problem because the LinkedIn search and recommendation algorithm that drives the channel was built on skills and location. Endorsed skills provide much better results than free text job titles or summaries, hence the drive to skills. The skills endorsements are also important because they should give us much better results to need than the free text and inconsistent recommendations in the old style LinkedIn. If LinkedIn can get an accurate breakdown of skills for every user, and get them endorsed by other users, it adds a very useful dimension to the channel, particularly for search, as skills, rather than experience become the new currency.

Much of the criticism from some of the great and the good is that the new style of endorsements are just too easy, and are taking credibility away from the channel. If we have learnt anything about social media, it is that users don’t like change. Just when we get comfortable, the channel goes and changes things and we feel like they are changing our place. They rarely tell us it’s coming either, which gives us no time to think about it. One day we log in and it all looks and feels different. As a result, I expect to hear some complaint around new things, but the noise over endorsements seems to be gathering momentum.

I was a bit surprised about the approach from LinkedIn, but I have kept an open mind to see what the real impact would be on profiles, after all, I was hearing that these endorsements had little value, because they were so easy, just like BranchOut. Now that we are about 6 weeks in, the endorsements are starting to have real impact. For a start, nearly all the active profiles on LinkedIn now have enough endorsements to get a good picture of the skills of the user. this is because the skills on the profile are defined by the user and endorsed by others. This has real value in search and recommendation, where the results have become noticeably more relevant as the endorsements have grown.

I’ve also noticed that on the whole, users are being fussy over their endorsements. They might not have as much knowledge of the users to give a detailed endorsements, but they don’t appear to be saying yes to everything. Endorsements to some degree are earnt on reputation, and are not being given on mass because it is easy. To test this theory, I have looked at 5 people I know quite well, and the top 5 things they are endorsed for. I haven’t found anything I would dispute or disagree with. These are the 5:

If you don’t know all the names on the list, check a few who you do know. Knowing each of these individuals, I would agree with all these lists. This gives me confidence in the endorsements held by the people I don’t know, and in the search results and recommendations based on the endorsements. Despite the criticism this looks like being another really useful feature, based on the results rather than the noise of the moaners.

In the process of researching this post, I also got to see the new profile layout that are slowly getting rolled out. This changes the look and gives some extra really useful data. If you want to see what yours will look like when you get it check the profiles for Laurie Ruettimann
and Glen Cathey.

Now go check the endorsements of people you know, and see if you still think they are of little value,

Bill

Sign up for the #SocialAgency Hangout hosted by Bill Boorman on 15th Nov

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4 comments for “Did LinkedIn just become BranchOut? The endorsement story”

I see at least 2 other fundamental problems with this endorsement feature on LinkedIn:

1) people are endorsing others based on reputation & perception, not actual verified skills (to verify a skill you need to really know how the person work and to be able to judge this skill = that’s complicated). That’s a fundamental flaw of the feature and I think it’s worth being underlined. It’s a matter of personal branding mor than skills. That’s how people (that even don’t know you in person) perceive you!

2) LinkedIn pushes some skills to your connections so that they can endorse you for them. And after a few endorsements, people would see first on your profile the skills that you have more been endorsed about. So, it means that skills that will get more visibility will be those skills. And I really believe that people will tend to vote more for those skills (because they are the first they see and because they may be more confident that you’re skilled at that if you have so many people endorsing you for that skill). So it means that the very few endorsements you will get (that are more or less random and depends on who your most active connections are and what skills did LinkedIn push about you to them) have a strong influence on the future of your endorsements so far. This is even more true since only your top 10 skills get real visibility on your profile today.

In all your examples, you take people that are rockstars in their field. I have little doubt that it will of course work for these people: skills & reputation are aligned. That’s easy! But 99% of people are not like this!

However, I can see a clear interest in endorsements: it gives a strong incentive to people to fill in their own skills so that they are endorsed more easily (and they also add the skills that others added for them, kind of crowdsourcing the completion of your skills to your connections). So there is clearly a value in them, at least from the point of view of profile completeness (but not accuracy
).

So I think that the next question to answer would be: what is the “ultimate” goal of LinkedIn with skills endorsements? I think that today it’s mainly about creating an incentive to fill in your skills + increasing engagement with the platform. In terms of intrinsic value of the endorsements themselves, in some kind of klout score: it measures more the “social influence” you have around this skill (do people perceive you as gifted in this skill, not if you actually have it, so that’s just a correlation) than the actual skill.

But there will be a real need at some point in the future for LinkedIn and Viadeo (did you know that Viadeo was the first to introduce this endorsement feature in beta in early 2012?!) to make it possible to measure more seriously the skills of people. Because that’s the real problem of social profiles: everybody’s amazing, everybody’s good, everybody’s a top achiever! And being recognized by other people for what you do is often, especially on Internet, more a matter of personal marketing / branding than of actually having the skill… But implementing a really smart & accurate endorsement feature would most likely require a level of engagement from users that none of those platforms have had so far.

Interesting development and folks seem to enjoy doing this, though I have not quite figured out how to do this in an intuitive way myself. In any case, I find the whole skills and competency world to be such an industry and this tagging requires manual updates and gets outdated rather quickly. I have found a lot of people really don’t bother with trying to get found in this way. Recruiters may feel it makes finding people easier (did not realise how steep the LinkedIn fees are for this though!), but I agree with Boris, it is not necessarily more accurate.

I am in the moaners camp at this time, struggling to see the value. Not sure how it will enhance Glen Cathey, his reputation is broader than a ballot!
I like others am being asked to endorse people, and wonder if you can give a negative endorsement?
Final though on the value of an endorsement, some are worth having, again using Glen as an example, if he were to endorse someone it would be a gold star, some others I have seen are like a black mark, an endorsement from someone who’s opinion you do not value. Some others are a joke.